Top Tabs

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Watching The Inauguration With Placeshifting Software

Unless you have been living under a rock (in the U.S. at least) you probably at least knew the United States Presidential Inauguration for President Obama was taking place. Like many places all across the U.S. a good number of the workers in my office were attempting to watched the Inauguration ceremonies from one of the many streaming sites available on the web. What I noticed was many of those sites choked on the heavy usage and were either choppy or just plain crashed right during the speech. It was at this moment that my GeekTonic knowledge came in handy at the office as I was one of the few actually watching the broadcast in very good picture quality with zero playback problems. I did this with placeshifting - in particular SageTV Placeshifter on my laptop.

Using placeshifting, I was still using the internet to access the broadcast, but I was doing so to access my SageTV server at home. You could do this with other placeshifting software/hardware as well including Orb, Slingbox and now BeyondTV (Note: Only recorded content can be place-shifted with BeyondTV thus far)

Some day soon I need to do a full, SageTV Placeshifter review to go into more depth. I use it pretty often when I work late hours at the office. Access to all of my recorded shows, liveTV, movies and music - all with the same, familiar interface is a really nice feature when you're at your "home away from home" whether that's your work, a hotel or where-ever. And for those times when you want to catch something on TV and you're not at home, placeshifting is a great way to do it - yesterdays Inauguration is a great example of that.